From the IBM developerWorks phpblog today, there's a new tutorial on getting PHP to compile/build on a Windows machine from the source - PHP 6 (and PHP 5).

These instructions are intended to cover everything that you need to do to be able to build PHP on a Windows XP system. They may work on other Windows systems, I haven't checked. No prior knowledge is assumed, except how to perform basic operations using the windows command line (eg mkdir, copy) and how to use an editor (eg edit) and no software (other than Windows) is assumed to be installed.

The instructions have been tested with PHP6 and PHP5, the only difference being that any references to ICU can be ignored if you are building PHP5.

The tutorial starts with the download of all needed software - Visual C++, a Windows Server 2003 SDK and the .NET framework. The rest is broken up into three steps:

getting PHP and the prerequisites to prepare for the build

customizing the build environment (combining Visual Studio and the SDK)

performing the actual PHP build (including steps to build resolv.lib and running the compile from the command line).